Self-Organizing Man

Glad to be back home in the cold and gray. People in LA are so relentlessly happy!!!!

Spent the plane ride home thinking about bodies and identities. Imagine my surprise at finding out about an online survey conducted by Dr. Jillian Todd, a trans studies professor. The survey seeks to quantify all the transgender identities out there. (via Peterson Toscano)

So how about we quantify all the woman identities out there? Or all the man identities?

I get that this survey is supposed to be a watershed. The first of its kind! We need to do this! We’re people too!

But how do surveys like this one serve us?

Once Dr. Todd documents the existence of five, twelve or thirty-one flavors of trans, what then?

And how will this serve us?

So there are fifty-two varieties of us. Should we franchise ourselves out? Offer our services as party-enhancement units? “Living Up that Next Thanksgiving Dinner! Bring home a transsexual boi dyke cuir kid….” “So many to choose from!!”

In the end, we are, each of us, alone in a body that is changing from one moment to the next. The transsexual label I claim is a shorthand for a winding and long ongoing, ultimately, incomplete project. Ten years ago I was transsexual. Five years ago I was transgendered (we used the “ed” back then.) Two years I was a man. Now I’m transsexual, again. But it is with different feelings and understandings that today I use transsexual. So is it the same transsexual?

And how does this serve me and us?